in the cold. Edgar, perhaps you could help Christopher carry Giles inside. Fred, Lightning should be stabled. Lottie, my dear, perhaps you could make us all some tea?”
Her words jolted them back into the world of the living. A quarter hour later Giles had been laid out on the sitting room sofa beneath a blanket, Lightning was rubbed down and secure in his stall, and the company were gathered round the kitchen table, with steaming mugs in their hands, and a subdued Jasper lying on the stone floor. Melanie stared at the corner of the table. Little more than an hour ago Giles had sat there swinging his booted foot against the table leg, tossing a russet apple in the air.
Hopkins took a long draught from his mug, which contained something stronger than tea. “Who the
“I don’t know, sir.” Fred was slumped in his chair, chin tucked onto the sweat-soaked linen of his shirt, eyes glazed and vacant. “I shut him up safe in his pen before I took Lightning out. I checked the latch twice.”
Lottie, the maid, tucked a cinnamon-colored curl beneath her cap. “The gate to his pen is ajar.” She sounded almost apologetic, as though by discovering it she had made it so. “I checked before I came in to make the tea.”
Charles looked from Lottie to Christopher, the youngest of the stable lads. “Have you seen anyone about the stable today who doesn’t belong here?”
Hopkins thunked his mug on the tabletop. “Good God. Surely you don’t think this was deliberate.”
Charles met his gaze. “I’m not sure. It wouldn’t even occur to me if my wife and I hadn’t been the victims of so many accidents in the past twenty-four hours.”
Christopher tugged off his tweed cap, as though he had only just realized he was still wearing it. “We got a grain delivery while you were touring the yard.”
“An expected delivery?”
“Oh, yes.” Christopher turned his cap in his hands. “But it wasn’t the usual deliveryman. He said the regular chap was home with a chill. I didn’t think twice about it, it’s happened before. But—”
Charles flicked a glance at Melanie.
Melanie pressed the fabric of her skirt over her lap. Her limbs felt not quite steady. She kept looking at Charles and imagining Lightning’s hoof imprinted on his forehead. Despite the injuries they had both suffered in the past twenty-four hours, this was the first time death had intruded with full force. “I suppose it’s possible we were followed here,” she said. “But even if we were, it would have been very chancy.”
“Did you talk to this deliveryman?” Charles asked Christopher. “Did you say anything about Lightning?”
Christopher fingered the brim of the cap. “Not about Lightning by name. But he did ask why the dog was penned up—Jasper was lying there with his best woebegone look—and I said one of the horses that was out now went berserk round the dog.” The full realization of what his words might have meant registered in the young man’s dark eyes.
Charles clapped him on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known, lad. When did this man leave?”
“Twenty minutes or so ago.”
Charles shifted his gaze to Hopkins. “What would Jasper do if he was let out of the pen? Would he run out into the yard immediately?”
“What?” Hopkins ran a hand over his hair. “Oh, I see what you’re driving at. No, not necessarily. He might have sniffed round until he heard the horse’s hooves. Jasper loves the horses. Whenever there’s anything doing he wants to be in the middle of it. He—” Hopkins put a hand over his eyes. “My God, I can’t believe it’s happened.”
Lady Frances laid her hand over his own on the tabletop.
Edgar took a sip from his mug. “So Jasper could have been let loose sometime before Fred came back with the horse and then came running into the yard when he heard Lightning. Hard to see how this deliveryman could have counted on it all working, though.”
Fred looked up as though struck by a sudden thought. “I’m sorry—perhaps it’s none of my business—but why the devil would anyone want to hurt any of you, even assuming they could count on the ploy working?”
“No, actually it is your business.” Charles sat forward in his chair. “We were waiting to talk to you when the tragedy occurred.” Once again, he gave a brief outline of the story of Colin’s disappearance.
Lottie gasped, and Christopher’s eyes went wide. Fred shook his head, as though he was beyond shock. He stared at the sketch Melanie held out to him. “Yes, that’s Mrs. Somersby.” His gaze drifted over the picture, the past intruding on the present horror. “Lovely, wasn’t she? We all—Giles was as taken with her as any of us.” He put his fist against his mouth. “Christ.”
“I know,” Charles said. “Giles was a brave and generous lad, and he had no business being mixed up in any of this.”
“Do you remember the man Mrs. Somersby married?” Melanie asked. Such a simple question, on which so much rested.
“Oh, yes.” Fred’s hands curled round his mug. He had the graceful fingers of a man used to giving the subtlest commands with the reins. “When a woman you admire marries, you notice the man she chooses, even if you haven’t a prayer with her yourself.”
“London barrister, wasn’t he?” Christopher said.
“Yes. Started with a
A street. A house. A name. Melanie saw the realization break over Charles’s face, like the sweat that signals the end of a fever. “Thank you.” He drew a long breath. Beneath the table she could see his hands trembling. “Thank you very much.”
Charles stared at the oil painting that hung on the wall of his aunt’s library, between bookcases filled with French novels, parliamentary registers, and just about every volume of erotic poetry written from ancient times to the present.
The painting, in the soft, sensuous style of Sir Joshua Reynolds, showed two girls sitting on a blue blanket beneath the glistening leaves of a copper beach, a picnic basket beside them. Both girls had fair hair dressed in a profusion of loose curls. Both wore white frocks in the full-skirted, tight-waisted fashion that had been in vogue thirty-five years ago, one sashed in blue, the other in purple.
The girl with the purple sash had bright, buttery hair and the angular features, sharp eyes, and sardonic mouth that were characteristic of Lady Frances today. The girl in the blue sash was paler, her features more delicate. She might have been merely pretty in an insipid sort of way, were it not for the restless fever that burned in her eyes. As though she had a great thirst for life and knew, even at sixteen, that it could never be satisfied.
“She was ill, you know,” Charles said.
“Who?” Edgar’s voice came from the sofa behind him. They were alone in the room. Melanie had gone upstairs to change her gown before their return to London.
“Mama. Mother.” Beneath the smells of ink and leather and beeswax, Charles almost fancied he could catch a hint of jasmine. A teasing scent that always made him tense with wariness. In Lady Elizabeth Fraser’s presence one had had to be braced for anything. “Aunt Frances was right. Mother had a brilliant mind and she didn’t know what to do with it—much like Kitty. But it went beyond that. The black moods that confined her to bed for weeks on end. The reckless giddiness that had her staying up all hours and running crazy risks and flitting from one man’s bed to another—”
Edgar looked up from a contemplation of the carpet. “For God’s sake, Charles.” A pulse pounded beneath the pale skin of his jaw. “You’re saying Mother’s—indiscretions—were an illness?”
“Not exactly.” Charles walked to a Queen Anne chair by the fireplace. The fresh bandage Melanie had put on his leg felt stiff against his skin. “Aunt Frances told me once that when Mother was in one of her frenetic states she’d be convinced anything was possible. And then the depression would set in and she’d think that nothing was.” He stood behind the chair and rested his arms on its high back. “I didn’t understand until I saw the same symptoms in a friend in my college at Oxford. He wrote poetry. Quite good poetry, I thought. At times he’d stay up writing through the night convinced he was producing a work of genius. And then for a fortnight he’d scarcely leave his bed.”
